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New Asteroid Mining Company Emerges
coondoggie writes "A new company intends by 2015 to send a fleet of tiny satellites to mine passing asteroids for high-value metals. Deep Space Industries Inc.'s asteroid mining proposal begins in 2015, when the company plans to send out a squadron of 55lb cubesats, called Fireflies, that will explore near-Earth space for two to six months looking for target asteroids. The company's CEO said, 'Using resources harvested in space is the only way to afford permanent space development. More than 900 new asteroids that pass near Earth are discovered every year. They can be like the Iron Range of Minnesota was for the Detroit car industry last century — a key resource located near where it was needed. In this case, metals and fuel from asteroids can expand the in-space industries of this century. That is our strategy.'"
if after they made their own mine tailings, they noticed that there were already mine tailings there.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I bet you a hundred dollarpounds they get bought out by the Jupiter Mining Corporation
Worst. Signature. Ever.
55lbs cubesats, what can they carry back..
How much do you know about Asteroid Mining? Not much. And neither do these guys, because nobody has tried it before and there are still more unknowns than knowns. What I do know is that 2015, two years from now, is a totally and completely unrealistic goal. They would have to have surveys of potential candidates already done, launch windows nailed down, hardware completed and ready to go, support staff trained and ready, mineral recovery solution built, etc... You would be hard pressed to open a mine on Earth in just two years time, and Earth mining doesn't have astronomical launch costs. A 2015 timeline tells me that these guys are either insane or a scam.
I read the internet for the articles.
Fireflies (the exploratory satellites), but then I remembered if there were any danger of a collision, they could simply make the jump to hyperspace. Seems to work consistently well if I remember right...
And now this... coincidence?
This is what will they grow into
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Someone is reading 'Time" too much.
Where's Malenfant ?
Wake me up when they have a plan to mine beyond the heliopause. Yawn.
This is a violation of International treaties and amounts to conspiracy to commit theft.
This is a federal crime under US law.
They're a corporation. You must not live in the U.S. or you'd know that laws don't apply to corporations unless they fail to pay their brib^H^H^H^H Freedom & Democracy Support Fees.
NAMCO? :)
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
It's going to work out fine until Deep Space Industries starts forming an Alliance.
Then Mal is going to flip the fuck out.
Aren't minerals concentrated by water moving through rocks? Doesn't that mean there won't be minerals concentrated in space debris?
I really dislike the fact that we can't undo an unintentional mod here =-(
they're following a similar roadmap to Planetary Resources, but skipping the harvest-volatiles phase?
Also cool was this blurb near the end of the article on zero-g 3D Printing
Deep Space's construction activities will be aided by a patent-pending 3D printer called the MicroGravity Foundry, officials said. "The MicroGravity Foundry is the first 3D printer that creates high-density, high-strength metal components even in zero gravity," company co-founder and MicroGravity Foundry inventor Stephen Covey said in a statement. "Other metal 3D printers sinter powdered metal, which requires a gravity field and leaves a porous structure, or they use low-melting point metals with less strength."
I want to work for this company as their Material Defender. You know, just in case those robotic satellites malfunction and turn hostile.
Try to think about this solution with a blank slate view for a moment. Don't assign qualitative values as to whether an approach is "good" or not.
Mining for resources ultimately comes down to (resources gained)/(labor + energy + fixed costs + materials).
There are very huge amounts of resources available deeper in the earth's crusts, in the oceans, in the wilds of undeveloped countries, etc. All of them require somewhat more of one of the variables in that equation than mines that are open today.
Consider the case of space mining. Labor requirements : enormous, because each piece of space-rated hardware must be assembled by hand because space stuff tends to use one-off designs and of the best possible quality. Energy : enormous. You have to provide incredible amounts of energy to get asteroids to a recovery location near the Earth. Fixed costs : enormous : you have to develop a bunch of new technology for this to even be possible. And materials : enormously expensive because the rocket equation demands that you throw away most of your spacecraft to even reach low earth orbit.
Versus opening a new mine somewhere on earth, or mining a little bit deeper.
Now, there is one advantage to space mining : no one has legal claims that can be enforced on any of those celestial bodies. In the future, when we have radically more advanced technology, it might be cheaper to send self-replicating robots out somewhere than to try to unleash those same robots onto land on earth that someone is willing to fight over. We don't have that kind of technology, yet, and are many decades from developing it.
One other nasty fact : high performance rocket engines need several nuclear weapons worth of highly enriched uranium as fuel. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket
If you actually wanted to push a mountain of metals to near the earth in a reasonable amount of time, you'll want a very high performance engine. However, such an engine not only has weapons proliferation risks, once you get the asteroid under power you've got a weapon in itself.
Great now I want to dig out and play Homeworld again. Send out the miners to the local asteroid field and commence harvesting, cue the ethereal music. Forget building capital ships, building anything from material harvested from an asteroid would be pretty cool (except kinetic weapons).
I think it's more geared as a proof of concept. Amount of investment required to make this concept profitable is unjustified. It makes much better business-sense to keep torching the earth than spending billions to play Where's Waldo in space.
Unless they have over $10 billion in assets, I do not consider them truly serious. Mining is a capital intensive business. Earth has an entire surface to choose from, the ocean floor hasn't even been touched yet. Rockets, and equipment is seriously expensive. Gold is ~$50K USD per kilogram. That is 1 ton per Falcon 9 launch.
A asteroid mining kit you get a hard hat,pick axe,shovel and plus are exclusive hint book, all for 19.99 plus free shipping
How to evaluate a space related venture...
Step 1: Evaluate how much of the projected funding requirements they have actually secured and have banked
Step 2: For those from step 1 who have all the funding already in hand, evaluate where they will get the additional funding they didn't project that they'd need, that they'll actually end up needing. Disregard the rest.
Step 3: For those from step 2 who have a very plausible source of additional funds, then begin to consider their business plan, the TRL of the tech they plan to use, and the audacity/coolness factor of their vision. Don't let those things distract you prior to steps 1 & 2
If you don't clearly see that the money angle is nailed down, no matter how great the idea sounds, they aren't worth treating as more than SciFi. The reason companies like SpaceX, Bigelow Aerospace, Stratolauncher, Sierra Nevada, Planetary Resources, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, and a small number of others who seem to be incrementally bootstrapping their way up via less exciting but business saavy tactics deserve watching and being taken seriously, is that they all have a pretty clear source of money fueling what they are doing.
A venture like the one in this article might be worth watching, but we'll only know that when they release some info that indicates the funding picture is overwhelmingly plausible. I think I am not alone when I say I was disappointed with the recent Golden Spike announcement because they didn't announce the most critical part...that they had much of the funding in place.
How this could possibly be cost effective? I mean even in foreseeable future, the cost would be so much more than what ever they could gather.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Also, why is it a violation of international treaties to mine asteroids (if it is at all)? What morons would make a treaty that says 'nobody can mine asteroids'?
Hmm... Firefly's a good design. But tell me, does the mining satellite, the thing itself, have purpose? I mean if it's not actively mining an asteroid, is it still an asteroid mining satellite?
An asteroid may have precious substances, but we could spend more resources by far trying to tap them. Does that seem right to you?
For starters, they do not own those asteroids. Who are they to take what isn't theirs?
Mining asteroids also risks changing their trajectory, which may endanger the Earth or other stellar bodies.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I am being serious here: what rights do they have to those minerals if by some miracle this actually 'gets off the ground'? Is international law really Finders Keepers? Hard to believe.
Regardless, I could see the very real scenario of them being underwritten by someone with very deep pockets (ahem-China-ahem) in exchange for exclusive use of the minerals.
Nobody owns fish on the high seas (outside the 200 mile EEZ), but it's still legal to catch them - the taking of fish (or minerals) doesn't require a claim of sovereignty.
How hard would it be to nudge an asteroid toward Earth, then control its descent to the surface, in a non-wiping-out-a-major-city sort of fashion? It would probably be a lot cheaper to bring an asteroid to Earth first and then mine it, rather than send robots up to do it.
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
man saying something is impossible shouldn't interrupt man doing it.
Just what we need, Rogue Drones.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I guess this has the potential to go over cloud storage.
I don't understand how asteroid mining could be profitable with current technology. What is the delta-V budget for sending engines+fuel+mining equipment to a near-earth asteroid and returning it to earth? I'd imagine the per-kg cost exceeds the value of whatever you could possibly return, even if you found an asteroid made of solid gold and all you had to do was de-orbit it.
Gold = $50k/kg
Delta-IV Heavy = 9000 kg to Earth escape velocity @ $250 million = $28k/kg
If the delta-V requirement to bring a NEO back to earth from earth escape is ~4 km/s, and your rocket was say a RL10 with 100 kN @ 450 Isp, than the final rocket mass m1=mo*e^(-deltav/Isp*g0) would only be ~3600 kg. Assuming the engine + tankage weighs around 1000 kg, we're talking maybe 2600 kg payload return. Again at $250 million launch cost that is $96k/kg, almost double that of pure gold. And it's not like there are actual pure gold asteroids just floating around either. We're looking at a factor of 5-10 or even worse cost difference here.
SCV ready to go sir!
I am sure millions of people will happily throw money into this without any hope of return or success.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
We will become the Heechee.
CHON, anyone?
...the fact that her father was a stellar cartographer, and in 2340, he conducted a full spectrum mineralogical analysis of the Vlugta asteroids. He never had the means to follow up on what he found. Alsia's plan was to carry out her father's dream.
Wow has /. gone down hill, this article is a day old and I don't see one comment about ST:DS9 Rivals episode.
Link, to a website I googled to get the summary, couldn't find this mining reference on the Wikipedia page for the episode, was really a sub-plot, I can't vouch for this site, but seems to have the full details of the show.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Rivals_(episode)
Those who can, do.
Finally someone found a practical use for those old Cobalt servers.
They will get more from mining uranus than what they will get from these other endeavors.
So they don't own those asteroids? Who does, a bunch of ethically-bankrupt politicians claiming to "represent" the people of Earth? Great job they're not doing so far. I say if somebody has the guts to get out there and bring back the wealth of the void instead of open-cut mining our biosphere like the rest of the leeches, go for it.
The ability to mine asteroids also means the ability to avert that same risk. Be a shame if there's already an an asteroid out there on a collision trajectory with Earth and we go extinct because a bunch of whingers made sure we didn't have any spacecraft out there with the ability to do something about it.